Over the next hundred years, there would be novels, musical compositions, and movies including a 1943 Nazi propaganda film and the 1964 musical comedy The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In the months afterward, people could not stop writing poems about the Titanic, to the point where the New York Times felt the need to warn вЂњthat to write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.вЂќ Films about the event were being made within a month, songs like вЂњMy Sweetheart Went Down with the ShipвЂќ were released, and many cinemas were controversially showing fake footage purporting to be of the sinking (at least one riot resulted from the fraud).

Immediately after the sinking in 1912, a Titanic pop culture industry sprang up. (вЂњWHY THE HEEL AM I SO OBSESSED WITH THIS F****G SHIPвЂќ reads one comment.) The volume of books and articles available is staggering today one can even read individual accounts of what happened in each of the TitanicвЂ™s 20 different lifeboats. But of course, there are plenty who share the fascination-a 2.5 hour YouTube video showing an animation of the Titanic sinking in real time has over 70,000,000 views. I look back on my Titanic period and think of it as a little weird, like a child getting into the Hiroshima bombing or the Tenerife airport disaster. Its gift shop offers Titanic hip flasks, Titanic socks, Titanic cufflinks, authentic Titanic coal in a commemorative case, replicas of the first class salad plates, Titanic Christmas tree ornaments, Titanic paperweight with miniature iceberg, replicas of historical newspapers from the day, a childrenвЂ™s book called Travis The Time Traveler and the Terrifying Titanic, Titanic word search and coloring books, and a plush teddy bear wearing Captain SmithвЂ™s uniform.) (Today, the museum offers a 3-hour вЂњ First Class Dinner GalaвЂќ where you can reenact the experience of having a four-course meal as it would have been eaten in 1912, alongside actors playing Titanic captain Edward Smith and вЂњUnsinkableвЂќ Molly Brown. I also convinced my parents to take me to Titanic: The Experience, a museum in Orlando that recreated bits of the ship and featured rescued artifacts ranging from a wooden deck chair to the jewelry and combs of first-class passengers.

I donвЂ™t remember how I became obsessed with the disaster, but I remember spending long hours reading about it, thinking about it, and playing a computer game called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time in which you explored a realistic simulation of the ship, meeting various eccentric passengers and crew, and trying to solve a mystery before everybody drowned. As a little boy growing up in Florida, I went through a вЂњTitanicвЂќ phase.

Rich people in the titanic ship movie